Interiority and Jane Porter’s pocket diary
A guest post by Julie Park It’s been a critical commonplace after Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel to view the novel as the first literary form to represent psychological individuality in the context of everyday life. My research,…
Print or manuscript? Civilité type in early modern England
Have you ever received a fundraising letter in the mail that looks handwritten, or has a “handwritten” postscript or post-it note? This is an attempt, of course, to make the letter feel more personal. The recipient of the request is supposed to be…
So how do you find symbols in signature marks?
Sarah: In my last post, I showed some examples of books that use symbols in signature marks. But how did I find these books and how might you find more examples? It’s one thing to search for books printed in…
The symbols of signature marks
I’ve written before about what sort of information we can learn from studying signature marks, and Goran wrote recently about the use of Latin abbreviations to indicate the gathering. So I thought the time has come to look at some of the…
Identifying a leather bookplate
As became clear in the robust conversation around this month’s crocodile mystery, what we’re looking at is a leather bookplate—a circular, good-tooled leather bookplate stamped with the initials “E. H.” and a rose. While the object itself might have been…
William Dethick and the Shakespeare Grants of Arms
A guest post by Nigel Ramsay For many visitors to the Folger’s Heraldry exhibit, “Symbols of Honor,” the stars will be the three original draft grants on paper of Shakespeare’s coats of arms. These belong to the English heralds’ long-established…
An argent lion rampant: coats of arms in 17th-c. books
In recent months, the Folger Shakespeare Library added a rare emblem book to its holdings, a thin quarto bound in pasteboards holding 24 unnumbered leaves . The emblem book presents itself as a “new year’s gift” containing 13 engravings: one coat…
Let's make a model!
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Jana Dambrogio In 2010, Jana Dambrogio and I were thinking independently about slits and stabs in early modern letters. Jana, after having had made many models of the letters of Tomaso di Livieri from the…
Fun in cataloging, or, the mysterious 12mo
On occasion, interesting and unusual aspects of books, manuscripts, and prints catch the attention of the cataloger at work on them. One such item was written up by Sarah Werner last December in “‘Tis the season for almanacs.” The office of the…
Hidden notes, "bibliographic nightmares," and STC call numbers
Sometimes when keyword searching Hamnet, the results include mystery matches: when you Ctrl-V to find the word you’re looking for on the page, it’s not there. That’s because some fields only display on the “MARC view” tab. Usually the information isn’t worth…
Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait
So the mysterious eye of this month’s crocodile belongs to no other than Shakespeare, as some readers immediately recognized: Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare on the title page of the First Folio More specifically, it is Shakespeare’s left right eye as depicted…
Steady sellers
Recently, Jan van de Kamp, a scholar from the Netherlands, contacted me with the question of whether I knew a method to extract all religious steady sellers from the Short Title Catalogue, Netherlands (STCN). He would like to use that…